NEW YORK — Rising drug and alcohol overdoses, suicides and disease from chronic alcoholism — labeled “deaths of despair” by one expert — are cutting the lives of white Americans short by nearly a half a year on average.

Increases in these types of deaths among whites means that life expectancy for whites is not increasing as fast as it is for other groups, according to a government report that offers an unusual look at how different threats are affecting U.S. lifespans.

“Things are moving in the wrong direction,” said Anne Case, a Princeton University researcher, of what she calls “deaths of despair.”

Drawing from death certificate data, the new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focuses on what happened to white life expectancy between 2000 and 2014.

The work was a reaction to recent research that suggested drug overdoses and suicides have caused alarming increases in death rates for middle-aged white Americans. The new report, which did not perform the same analysis for blacks and Hispanics, was posted online Friday.